Book Review: Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll

By Dr Joseph S Maresca, BLOGCRITICS.ORG

Published 6:43 pm, Friday, November 23, 2012

Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us To The Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll is an excellent book about the nature of newly found particles like the Higgs Boson particle which is responsible for mass.

Carroll describes the Higgs Boson particle as a vibration around a steady value everywhere throughout the universe rather than a vibration around zero. The Higgs Boson particle has the potential to release energy like a ball rolling down a hill. Once fields are pushed from the preferred state, they are given potential energy.

Left on their own, Higgs Boson particles vibrate and dissipate energy by transferring it to other fields according to the author. The strength of weak interactions is 246 GeV; whereas, the Higgs Boson field sits at the lowest energy state on the bottom of a pendulum arc.

The author suggests creating Higgs Boson particles by detecting particles they decay into from a steady state. The objective of modern science is to prove where the Higgs Boson particles originate. Without Higgs Boson, scientists could not fathom how elementary particles have mass at all.

To date, scientists have found combinations of quarks and gluons that smash together to form the Higgs Boson particle. Once Higgs Bosson is created, the particle gives mass to other particles which created it. The author explains that the Higgs Boson particles are created at high energies. Space and time are known to change at high velocities according to the theory of relativity. Time slows down and lengths contract along the direction of motion.

Carroll shows how Dr. Richard Feynman described bosons geometrically. Forces carrying bosons are depicted with wavy lines. Fermions are depicted with solid lines and the Higgs Boson particle is shown with a dash. The Feynman geometryof bosons looks a bit like the characters in Morse Code.

Dr. Feynman showed diagrammatically how multiple gluons feed into a quark with a Higgs Boson as an output. Higgs Boson particles travel less than a billionth of an inch between their origination and decay. The process of proving how they exist and disintegrate is a continuing challenge for scientists which is limited by the fact that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

Particle at the End of the Universe is an important scientific work which explains current research findings on the Higgs Boson particle, as well as the scientific challenges inherent in proving the existence of the particle and the decay mechanism.